Is InDesign the Right Tool?
Before we dive into the details of InDesign accessibility techniques, let’s take a moment to step back and think about our overall strategy.
We’ll start with these two truths:
- The most accessible, multi-purpose digital format is HTML. Whenever possible, you should create documents in HTML rather than in any other format.
- InDesign is not the best tool for creating HTML documents.
InDesign can export to HTML, but if HTML is your primary format, you should probably use a different tool, because InDesign was designed to create publications, which usually end up printed on paper, or in PDF or EPUB digital formats.
So if HTML is ideal, and InDesign isn’t ideal for creating HTML, is it worth our time to talk about InDesign accessibility?
Yes, actually. It is. Even though HTML is usually the best choice for accessibility, PDF and EPUB documents can be very accessible if done right (with some caveats, explained below). You can create tagged PDF documents, which use almost identical structural semantics as HTML markup as the basis for its structural semantics, so the benefits of HTML accessibility apply to EPUB documents too.